Anglerfish

The anglerfish is a wonder of the deep-sea world. Its anatomy is unexplainable by science, and its behavior seems perfectly designed for its ecological niche. On the anglerfish's head is a long spindly tentacle or proboscis, at the end of which is a glowing bulb. The anglerfish hides in the sand at the bottom of the ocean, with only the glowing bulb sticking out. When small fish or plankton approach to investigate the light, the anglerfish opens its maw, lined with thousands of long, pointy, horribly translucent teeth, and the investigator is sucked to its doom.

The anglerfish was first reported in the 1700s by pearl divers in the Pacific, but it was not until the invention of the bathysphere in 1928 that scientists were able to observe the fish in its natural habitat, and later bring one to the surface for dissection. It turns out that the anglerfish is in most respects just like an ordinary fish (a trout or halibut, for example). The only differences are in its glowing proboscis, and in the curious fact that its males are so much smaller than the female (a phenomenon otherwise observed only in spiders and negroes). Some scientists therefore claim that the anglerfish must necessarily have "evolved" from an ordinary fish, but that clearly does not explain its spindly glowing bulb, which is not found in common fish.

Anglerfish are found in the depths of most of the world's oceans. The casual diver is well advised to steer clear of them, since — although the biggest anglerfish is still barely the size of a basketball — they are extremely ugly. There has never been any report of an anglerfish biting a human; it is apparently only the tiniest denizens of the deep which risk meeting what Quentin Reynolds has called "death in its most ghastly gob".